Eminem, Royce Da 5'9" Explain Dr. Dre's EP Absence

With no production credits from the good doctor on the upcoming Bad Meets Evil EP, rap fans have been wondering whether Eminem and Royce Da 5'9" forgot about Dre. Not exactly. During Wednesday's (May 18) "RapFix Live," Slim Shady explained Dre's absence on their upcoming joint project, titled Hell: The Sequel.

"I think Dre is, like, really cracking down on getting Detox finished, so I think he's more so focused on that," Em says of the producer who discovered him. Still, it wasn't like Eminem or Royce reached out to the Doc either. "I really didn't say anything to Dre till kinda like the last minute. We didn't really say anything to anybody about what was going on because we weren't sure what was going to happen with it," Slim explained to Sway. "It wasn't like I said, 'Yo, Dre, can we get a beat for this project that we're workin' on?' Because it wasn't really necessarily a project yet."

Hell: The Sequel does feature production work from Mobb Deep's Havoc, Sid Roams, Bangladesh, Denaun Porter, DJ Khalil and Supa Dups, who produced the project's first single, "Fast Lane." Still, there was no real science to selecting the beatmakers who'll appear on the EP, which is dropping June 14. "We didn't reach out to any producers, because we were just cuttin' random," Royce said. "And we didn't actually know that we were workin' on a project."

Eminem elaborated on how the duo went about securing music for the record. "It was more so that we were getting beat CDs from the label — from Shady and some of the A&Rs there were sending us beat CDs from various producers — and we would hear beats like, 'That one's crazy.' "

images/source: MTV